In a New Yorker blog post responding to Herman Cain’s announcement last year that he had decided to suspend his presidential campaign, Amy Davidson wrote, “Cain suspending his campaign means that we will no longer have to suspend our disbelief about the seriousness of his candidacy, or about what’s become of our political culture.”

When I read it last fall, Davidson’s quip made me laugh in recognition (and relief).  But as this new spring semester gets underway, I’ve been thinking a lot about the suspension of disbelief, and I’m not laughing. A new crop of students sits in my classes—radiating in the optimism of a brand new semester when, as one of my colleagues puts it, everyone has an A—making me reflect on all the ways that contemporary educational culture asks us to suspend our disbelief.  Take the insistent movement toward accountability standards and tests. Sure, the new standards and tests may result in some students and schools being left behind but—the story goes—high standards and the means to assess them are necessary to keep our schools competitive and rigorous.  If students and schools fail, it’s a result of their own incompetence, not of flawed assessment measures or underlying social factors like, say, poverty. Or this one: We need to protect the interests of the wealthiest Americans by sacrificing access to some of our most basic rights, such as education.

Last fall, when CUNY students and their supporters protested the Board of Trustee vote to raise undergraduate tuition by $300 per year for the next four years, they were done suspending disbelief. Their message: don’t balance the state’s budget deficit on the backs of some of the neediest New Yorkers trying to participate in the promise of higher education.

Shortly after the protests, the president of my college sent an email message to faculty in which he contextualized the approved tuition increase:

New York State has faced large deficits and a continuing bad economy that has reduced tax revenues. As a result, CUNY has had to absorb a $300 million reduction in state support over the past three years alone. To compound the problem, previous tuition increases have been used to offset the State’s deficit. But this time it is different: for the first time, there is an agreement whereby proceeds of the tuition increase will go directly to CUNY for disbursement to the colleges for student support services and the hiring of faculty.

The president outlined some of the support available to students to help offset the tuition increase: New York State Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) awards, need-based Federal Pell grants, federal tax credits, and merit- and need-based awards covered by the Baruch College Fund.

It’s true: Many CUNY students benefit from some combination of these awards. But noting their existence, like reciting the reality of the state budget woes, does little to square the exchanges and sacrifices we’re being asked to make in education. Many of these exchanges come bundled in educational reform packages based on a corporate model that, as Kenneth J. Saltman argues, imagines “public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product.”

When education gets framed as a consumer good, we’re quietly asked to erase any lingering notions of education as a common good.